Priorities

Renovation is careful work, and it's important to focus on the critical pieces of infrastructure first. You have to make your list of things that are important to accomplish. You have to be careful to tightly manage your schedule and stay focused, keeping communication flowing between all of the parties involved in order to keep the project on time and on budget. You can't get let yourself get distracted, or all is simply lost.

House on Soquel Creek

I mentioned in a previous post that we're moving shortly and, sadly, will be leaving Bear Mountain proper for a house we've just purchased a few miles away. We'll still in the mountains, and just a mile or so from the San Andreas fault line, on the edge of where the land drops down to Soquel Creek (which meets the Pacific near Capitola). It's a beautiful stretch of mostly flat, usable land with great sun, all fenced in with a number of buildings on the property making it something of a family compound. If you're reading this blog, I'm sure you're familiar with the cost of real estate in California and I'll spare you the diatribe on how expensive things are. We feel lucky getting into a place with such great potential.

The house requires some work to realize that potential, though. We'll be putting in central heating, a roof, a new kitchen, new bathrooms, running new water pipes (the current tank is connected through a garden hose to the main house) new siding, and refinishing floors to start, and I plan to branch out after that to rooftop solar power and a rainwater catchment system for irrigation. I'll be cleaning up a storage shed for a writing workshop, and we have a separate guest house, too that will need even more work. I'll chronicle our progress here as we renovate

We started by tenting the main buildings to get rid of termites, the day after closing.